Rancher Stack for VPS

I have been playing around with Rancher, K8 and so on my Hetzner VPS… for a couple of days. Most of it paved with issues regarding networking and connecting to my deployments/nodes through an external-ip.

What is the easiest way to run and manage docker containers across systems/providers. Specifically which version of Kubernetes (K8/microKube/K3), which load-balancer (metallb/kube-vip) etc.

Not sure if it matters for the context, but my use-case will mostly revolve around ML-Pipelines and Django applications.

-and as an added bonus, maybe you could fill me in on how to integrate nodes from the big cloud providers (most provide a free node) through this setup.